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| - Strings has been on my radar for a while since it was pretty famous in Chicago for its hell ramen, so I was stoked to find out that they opened a location in Madison.
I rolled in with the squad on a week night. The first thing I noticed was the appetizing smell of boiling bone broth being prepared which was a smell I was familiar with since I had just made ramen broth the week before. There were illustrations of different ramen styles on the wall, and the kitchen was visible from every part of the restaurant allowing you to see all the hard work that goes into preparing a bowl of ramen. A lot of the glass in the restaurant is covered in different words to describe ramen. Ramen lovers will be excited upon entering this place.
We were told that the wait was about 20 minutes, so we put our names down. The wait actually ended up being 45 minutes, but at least they gave us some hot green tea to sip on while we waited.
When we finally sat down, and were greeted by our server. Although, he was really nice, his service just felt so ingenuine and rehearsed. For example, as he walked through the menu, he pushed the veggie gyoza really hard saying that it was easily their most popular item, but they were out of pork gyoza, so that made me think that they wee just trying to get rid of it before it went bad.
As an appetizer ordered cat rice, and I added uni (sea urchin gonads) for $5 per my server's suggestion. The cat rice was a bowl of rice seasoned with soy sauce and furikake then topped with cubes of raw tuna tossed in spicy mayo. It was pretty good at first, but it started to just taste like rice and soy sauce after a while. The uni was a pointless addition. Though $5 for a little uni was fair price, it was such an insignificant amount that they tried to make up for by serving it in between two halves of a soft boiled egg. The egg went pretty well with the rice, but the uni didn't. I was surprised to see the uni drenched in egg yolk because the uni itself has a delicate, unique taste. The egg yolk only overpowered the uni and took away what makes uni so special.
We all ordered our ramen with an egg for an extra $1, but neither the menu or the server warned us that our ramen already came with half an egg, so we were surprised when we got our ramen with eggs on the side. They seemed to take pride in their fresh noodles, but they had a weak texture without any chewiness. The tonkotsu broth had a pretty average flavor, but the spicy clam and pork version was pretty good. The chashu pork belly slice was pretty good; it was soft and melty and had a beautiful char on it.
After dinner, we were offered little cookies (that the server gushed about) in exchange for getting photographed for their social media. I've done worse for free food, so we obliged. Our server thanked us and asked us to tell people about Strings claiming that there haven't been a lot of customers (even though we had to wait for 45 minutes for a table on a week night).
Overall, I thought the food was a little better than ok. What I didn't like was how dishonest and corporate the vibes were. The words used for decoration on the wall talked about a bunch of different kinds of ramen that they don't even serve. The host gave us an estimated wait time that was half of what the real wait time was. Our server tried to get us to order things that we didn't need; I just felt like we were being nickel and dimed. I recommend trying Strings if you like ramen, but don't be surprised if their gimmicks turn you off. However, one should keep in mind that this location is still very new; I'm sure there are still some things that need to be worked out.
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